It has been several years since I lost a dear friend who once taught rhetoric at the University of Iowa. She told me that one of the first things she did in every class was to write on the chalkboard the word (or non-word), ‘alot’ and warn her students that if she ever saw that used in any written work, it would mean an automatic grade of F. “Alot’ is impossible to detect in speech, for it has a couple commonly used homonyms (‘a lot’ and ‘allot.’) Fortunately for today’s students, the current spell-checkers automatically correct that usage, but many still persist in believing it to be a legitimate word meaning ‘many.’ Similarly, the term ‘ahold’ should be written as two words, as in…’get a hold on the reins…’ this leaves the opportunity to clarify the word ‘hold’ as in ‘a firm (or loose, etc.) hold’. In any case, I feel ‘get a hold of that’ to be fairly ambiguous. I also question the use of the word ‘of’ and suggest that ‘a hold on’ would be more accurate.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the difference between ‘less’ and ‘fewer.’ The first refers to amounts, the second to numbers. A current lawn-care commercial illustrates the frequent confusion regarding the words; “…if you want greener grass, less weeds and less bugs…” In both instances the word ‘less’ should be replaced by ‘fewer’ as it refers to the number of weeds and bugs. You could rephrase the statement to ‘…less trouble with weeds and less poisonous spray to control the bugs…” The word ‘less’ then refers to trouble and spray which are measured in amounts, not numbers.

Nobody, not even our most articulate television news anchor, seems to know that ‘loan’ is a noun and that, when we let someone use our lawnmower, we lend it to them. ‘Lend’ is the verb (the action word) that says we are granting the use of the lawnmower. The lawnmower itself is the loan – a noun.

I have no idea why some writers persist in tacking a meaningless ‘s’ onto the end of ‘toward’ as in the nearly universally used ‘going towards’ something. ‘Toward’ means ‘moving in the direction of’ so what purpose does the ‘s’ serve?

Few writers seem to care about the difference between ‘farther’ and ‘further’. There are no complicated rules about the proper usage. It’s very simple: ‘farther’ refers to measurable distances only; for everything else, use ‘further’.

Punctuation rules change over time and vary for different types of written material. There are apparently differing standards for different genres, at least according to my observations of scholarly writing, newspapers, popular novels and so forth. British and American English currently disagree on just about everything. Many punctuation sins go undetected in speech because we can’t always hear the distinctions commas and periods, etc. provide. But, if we could, we might be alarmed at being asked, “What’s that in the road – a head?” or wonder how it could be that someone ‘changed into a suit and tie’, or ‘a frilly party dress’.

It all reminds me of an old vaudeville routine where the repairman is asked why he hasn’t yet fixed a damaged bicycle. “Well,” he explained, “I just haven’t been able to get around to it.”

“I’ll see what I can find,” says the customer and he rushes out before the repairman can say anything more. He’s gone for hours and finally comes back greatly discouraged. “I went to every hardware store in the county” he said. “even a couple used bike dealers, and nobody had any tuits at all, and certainly no round ones.”

Mrs. Cotter taught eighth grade English in my junior high years. I’m pretty sure that she would give failing grades to a lot of the people who are presently making their livings writing advertising, TV scripts and even news stories. A stickler for accuracy and clarity, she would no doubt wonder, as I do, why those air fresheners and room deodorizers claiming to eliminate all the odors in the air don’t also get rid of their own spicy or flowery smells?